Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 16

Over on the Huffington Post, the Book Doctors interviewed me about Bang, pizza, and writing books that teens read.

TBD: How did you learn to become a writer?

BL: I sort of figured it out on my own, really. I knew at a very young age that I wanted to tell stories, and I was manic in my reading. I read constantly. Every chance I had, I would have my nose in a book. So I sort of absorbed a lot of the lessons and the rhythms of writing and internalized them subconsciously. Which isn’t to say that I was a great writer the first time my fingers touched the keyboard! Hell, no! I still had to practice and hone my craft, which took literally decades. But no one ever really sat me down and taught me how to start — I figured that out on my own and then just kept iterating and trying until things started to click.

Read the complete interview on HuffPo!

After last month’s extremely dark turn, I thought maybe something a little lighter for this month… So, let’s read about a super-powered serial killer!

A hero. A villain. And a cop caught in between.

“Sometimes it feels more like they’re all involved in some kind of celestial chess match and we’re less than pawns. We’re the board. And no one cares what happens to the board.” — Capt. J. Fannon (Chicago Police Dept.)

Blending his serial killer bona fides and his love of super-hero comics, Barry Lyga presents a tale from the point of view of a Chicago cop trying to hunt a super-powered murderer. But which is more vexing: discovering the identity of the killer or uncovering the secrets behind the super-hero who’s helping out on the case?

As always, the story is $1.99 and all proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.

Please buy the story and spread the word! Thanks!

Amazon/Kindle
Barnes & Noble/Nook
iBooks
Kobo

I’m so happy to announce that Bang has received its fourth star, courtesy of the folks at Shelf Awareness, who say, in part:

Lyga shifts among variations on guilt, healing, gun violence and Islamophobia with ease as Sebastian struggles to cope with his complicated life. Though YA stories often absent parents from the action, Sebastian’s relationships with his estranged father and irreparably damaged mother grant an extra layer of reality. Painfully raw and accented with hope and anguish, Bang will connect solidly with older teens looking for a deep and affecting story.

Thanks, Shelf Awareness! Check out the entire review.

The New York Times Book Review has posted its review of Bang. Needless to say, I’m stoked:

Lyga captures the heartbreak of Sebastian’s situation with sensitivity and compassion, exploring how a life can be unfairly defined by just one action, how it’s tragically easy to ignore humanity in favor of a headline, and just what communication, love and sharing the truth can do, especially when it comes to forgiving oneself.

You can read the complete review at the Times website.

Thus far, the stories I’ve published in my series of ACLU fundraisers have been previously-written pieces that I’ve polished up before sending them out into the world.

This month, the story is brand-new. I finished it about a week ago.

ALL PROCEEDS FROM THIS STORY GO TO THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION!

The place: The suburbs.

The time: Tomorrow, maybe.

The situation: Ray is just trying to get by in the newer, greater America. With a wife and a new baby, he can’t afford to get mixed up in politics or the fight for civil liberties. But as the world shrinks and darkens around him, Ray finds that the safe harbor he’s crafted for himself and his family may not be big enough or strong enough to stand.

And then one night, there’s a knock at the door. Now there’s nowhere to hide, and soon Ray will have to make the hardest decision of his life.

With cold, relentless precision, Barry Lyga explores a future that is too close for comfort in what might be his darkest, most disturbing work to date.

“Four Minutes” may, indeed, be the most brutal thing I’ve ever written. And that’s saying something.

Give this story a chance. Buy it. Read it. Spread the word. Let’s put some more cash in the ACLU’s pocket.

You can find “Four Minutes” here:

Amazon/Kindle
BN.com/Nook
iBooks
Kobo

If you’re going to be in the area of one of my tour stops for Bang, then I’ll be happy to sign your book for you. Sadly, though, I can’t be everywhere, which means I can’t sign every book.

However, some very cool folks at some great indie bookstores around the country are making it possible for you to get a signed copy of Bang on publication day!

It’s simple: All you do is go to the store (or go to their online store) and preorder a copy of Bang from them. When you get your copy on April 18, it will be signed by yours truly! Easy, right?

One caveat: You must place your preorder by Friday, April 14!

Here are the stores currently offering signed books to preorder customers:

Changing Hands, Tempe, AZ
Books of Wonder, New York, NY
Addendum Books, St. Paul, MN
Blue Willow Books, Houston, TX
BookPeople, Austin, TX
Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, GA

(You can read an excerpt of Bang on EW.com!)

I’m neither a lawyer nor a Constitutional scholar, but I’m going to talk a little bit about the Constitution today anyway. It doesn’t seem to stop anyone else.

Recently, the Trump Administration unveiled its first budget, to the outraged horror of the masses. Included are massive cuts to just about everything that doesn’t involve fuel or gunpowder or both. The justifications for these cuts1 generally comes down to “We can’t ask the American people to foot the bill for X any longer.” It’s a very, very cynical ploy because as far as I can tell, no one has actually asked for PBS and Meals on Wheels (for example) to go away. But to hear the Administration’s drones tell the story, apparently this was Very, Very Necessary.

It’s pretty grotesque to spin getting rid of food for indigent senior citizens as “compassionate,” but that’s exactly what the artificial lifeform disguised as a human being designated “Mick Mulvaney” did, saying that it might seem cruel, but it’s really kind…to “the folks who give us the money in the first place. And I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them and say, ‘Look, we’re not gonna ask you for your hard-earned money, anymore, single mother of two in Detroit . . . unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually being used in a proper function.'”

Because how on earth could keeping poor old people from starving to death be a “proper function” of money?

“Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?” Mulvaney’s firmware-driven colloquy engine continued. “The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

(Just so you know: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received $445 million in federal funding in the last fiscal year. The federal budget is around $4 trillion.)

Now, let’s set aside the faux pearl-clutching on behalf of poor coal miners and single moms. And let’s set aside the risible notion that a wealthy lifelong lawyer and politician (as Mick Mulvaney is programmed to emulate) knows what a coal miner or a single mom wants and needs. Let’s just look at what’s really going on here: That the Administration has some pretty hard-core ideas about what it is appropriate to spend taxpayers’ money on.

Some Things It’s Not OK to Spend Money On

Food for old people
Arts programs that enlighten and educate regardless of income level or geographic location
Science

Things It’s OK to Spend Money On

Presidential golf
Bombs
Walls that don’t actually keep people out

Now, you may be thinking, “This is all well and good, Barry, but what does the Constitution have to do with this? The Constitution does not require the government to spend money on any particular thing. Even things you like.”

True.

Or maybe not so true.

When we talk about the Constitution, we tend to talk about the nitty-gritty specifics of Articles and Sections. We parse the words. We listen as the insufferable originalists spout their bull about how we must interpret the Constitution exactly as the Founders intended as that is the only valid interpretation, even though they themselves rarely do just that.

But how often do we talk about, well, the Preamble?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Of course, if you are Of a Certain Age (as I am), you probably can’t see or read that without hearing this in your head (and possibly humming along):

Those aren’t just cute words that the Founders thought made for a nice opening number. They’re not like the useless Prologue in that bad fantasy novel you read last week, the one that the author really should have cut. The Preamble is as much a part of the Constitution as the Bill of Rights, and it deserves some consideration.

Look back over those words. In the Preamble, the Founders are saying, “Look, here’s why we’re writing this damn thing in the first place. All of the Articles and Sections and Bills you’re about to read — they exist because of what we’re saying right here in the Preamble. Everything you do with the document you’re reading, you need to do bearing in mind that this is why we wrote it.”

In short: All of the powers and rights enumerated in the Constitution itself are the means. The Preamble is the end. We need to use those powers in order to create a situation whereby the specifics of the Preamble are met.

Fortunately for all of us, those specifics are super-simple and super-easy to understand. It’s not complicated at all.

establish Justice — Seems pretty obvious, right? Let’s make this a place where people are treated justly. So, black folks shouldn’t be shot in the street like animals. And when women are harassed or molested, we should do something about that, no? Those things are just, aren’t they?

insure domestic Tranquility — You could be a smartass and say that this is about your home life, but let’s be real — “domestic” is in opposition to “foreign.” In other words, let’s be at peace within our borders.

provide for the common defense — I don’t think (and neither do you) that the Founders meant common as in everyday. They meant common as in belonging to or affecting the public. Trump’s budget only gets part of this right. Yeah, he’s increasing military spending, but that’s not the only component of a “common defense.” If you think the only thing that keeps us safe is guns, bombers, and warships, you’re nuts. Shielding us from massive climate change contributes to the “common defense,” as does not taking actions that breed more terrorists.

promote the general Welfare — Here’s the big one. This isn’t about finding General Welfare and making him a four-star general, people. This is about seeing to it that all of us are okay. That we aren’t suffering. That old people without any money aren’t going hungry and that kids everywhere (even — gasp! — in coal country) can come to appreciate their community and their country through sensible arts education.

Here’s just one example, courtesy of Bloomberg:

Take the town of Whitesburg, Kentucky. The NEA and NEH funded a program by Appalshop that preserves the film, tapes and photographs needed to tell the story of the region’s history and culture. But for the NEA and NEH’s investments and the validation that those investments provided, philanthropies like the Mellon Foundation would have been less likely to lend private support to the project. The eastern Kentucky community doesn’t have much wealth or many potential private donors — but that doesn’t make its history any less critical to capture than New York’s or Boston’s. The program not only promotes civic pride, but also gives young people training and work in an economy still finding its footing as its coal-mining foundation fades.

Trump and Co. talk a lot about their precious coal miners, but apparently don’t care if those folks understand and appreciate their own history and communities or learn something other than coal mining.

secure the Blessings of Liberty — This one is so easy. Because it’s impossible without the others. You do the others and this one falls into line all on its own.

So, what have I spent all of this time and all of these words trying to say? It’s simple: The Constitution is not merely a checklist of dos and don’ts, of allowances and prohibitions. It is a document that does not simply circumscribe government’s behavior. It sets the government’s goals. It establishes the necessary end-game. And it doesn’t say at all that if a coal miner or a single mom doesn’t want something that this means we just toss it out.

But of course, the coal miners and single moms never said that. Certainly not en masse. They’re just being cynically exploited by the Mick-bot 2.0. Which, BTW, needs its software updated to include the Preamble to the Constitution.

A misnomer, really, as some of these are “cuts” the same way a screwdriver to the carotid is a “cut.”

I am a guest on this week’s episode of the Professional Book Nerds podcast. Topics of conversation include: Bang, when and why I do research, my awesome Wonder Woman idea, pizza, and more!

You can subscribe or download the episode in your favorite podcast player or listen to the embedded episode here.

Over at the IWSG, I can be seen blathering answers to questions ranging from my most prized comic book to my top piece of advice for writers. And I say stuff like this:

When I get to the end of the story and feel a sense of satisfaction, I know it’s done. It’s baked. Time to take it out of the oven and put it on a serving platter.

And this:

I just write what interests me and then cross my fingers and hope that it will interest others as well!

Go check out the entire interview!

Hey, some more good news for Bang has come my way: the book has been included in the “Spring’s Best YA Fiction” list on Amazon’s Spring Reading Preview!

Bang joins nineteen other titles, including The Hate U Give and Strange the Dreamer. Check it out at this link (you’ll need to scroll down past the younger ages to the YA books).